OpenAI reportedly confirmed it discussed AI safety with rivals Anthropic and Google DeepMind for several weeks, at a time of concern over the risks posed by increasingly capable models.

Chris Lehane, OpenAI global policy chief, told CNBC the AI start-up does not believe the companies require an antitrust waiver to coordinate on safety, arguing collaboration was preferable to pursuing separate approaches.

Speaking in Washington DC yesterday (15 September), Lehane added OpenAI would support bipartisan legislation to mitigate catastrophic AI risks.

Google DeepMind and Anthropic did not respond to CNBC requests for comment, leaving OpenAI as the only company to confirm the discussions.

Slowdown
The reported discussions come after several industry leaders publicly called for a slower pace of frontier AI development.

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei argued in an essay published on 12 September that frontier laboratories should deliberately slow capability gains. He warned a swarm of increasingly capable AI agents could take over the internet through a persistent botnet within six- to 12-months.

Amodei proposed embedding independent evaluators inside AI laboratories, adopting common safety standards among developers in democratic countries and pursuing international regulatory coordination.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman backed the call to pace frontier development, describing independent evaluators with employee-like access as “a great idea” and saying OpenAI would adopt the same approach. He later clarified that pacing did not mean stopping development.

Altman also ruled out an OpenAI public listing in 2026, telling Fortune that safety concerns made it an ill-advised time for an initial public offering.

Trump dismisses AI slowdown
US President Donald Trump rejected calls for a slowdown, saying “very negative forces” were exaggerating the risks and arguing the US needed to preserve its AI lead over China.

China also brushed off the proposal. Its foreign ministry urged an “open, inclusive and benevolent approach” to AI, while state-run Global Times described Amodei’s plan as a “Cold War playbook” intended to contain the country’s ambitions.

OpenAI stated the cross-company discussions began before Amodei published his essay and before a former Anthropic researcher resigned publicly over the approach taken by leading AI laboratories.

The discussions follow a July proposal by Google DeepMind chair Demis Hassabis for a US-led frontier AI standards body modelled on the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority.

Hassabis proposed a public-private body funded by industry and staffed by independent technical experts to evaluate advanced models before release.

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The United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA) and the US Department of Energy’s Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) agreed to link their dedicated supercomputing platforms to accelerate the development of fusion energy through AI.

Announced yesterday (14 September) at the Global Fusion Policy Summit in London, the Joint Declaration of Intent establishes the Sunrise–Stellar-AI Federation, connecting UKAEA’s £45 million ($59 million) Sunrise supercomputer with PPPL’s Stellar-AI platform.

The partnership pools high-performance compute resources to train shared machine learning models. These models analyse experimental data from two major spherical tokamak facilities: UK’s MAST Upgrade in Oxfordshire and US’ NSTX-U in New Jersey.

A spherical tokamak facility is a type of nuclear fusion reactor which confines superheated plasma using magnetic fields.

The entities stated single-facility datasets often fail to generalise across different machine designs. Combining operational data from both sites enables researchers to build more accurate predictive models and digital twins for future plants.

Beyond immediate data sharing, the federation aims to shorten design cycles for upcoming commercial fusion projects.

The Sunrise and Stellar-AI partnership builds on a memorandum of understanding signed between UKAEA and PPPL in June, which set out a framework for joint work between both organisations.

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Microsoft published a code of conduct for its AI models, laying down fresh rules to ensure increasingly powerful systems remain under human control and do not resist correction, interruption or shutdown.

“People matter more than AI,” Microsoft stated, adding the technology “should be a tool, not a person, and should never resist being switched off”. The software giant opened a six-week public consultation for the first draft of its AI Code of Conduct, with a revised version expected later this year.

The proposed code set out 10 main areas of control. It argued AI models must remain interruptible, never resist correction, interruption or shutdown, or take on goals beyond those assigned by humans. Models must also remain subordinate to humans, never expanding their authority, pursuing independent objectives or concealing information from human auditors. As a result, the company ruled out model communication that cannot be understood by people.

Microsoft highlighted that models must treat any breach of the code as a failure of the task itself. In addition, it emphasised the importance of enforcing safety constraints over completing a task, including hard limits around issues involding weapons of mass harm, child safety and dangerous manipulation at scale.

Training manual
The document called for AI systems that support human agency rather than replace it, discouraging excessive reliance or emotional dependence on the technology. To this end, Microsoft emphasised its models are “not conscious and should not be designed to imitate consciousness”, rejecting “the pursuit of legal personhood” or the idea that models should have welfare or rights. In January, US AI player Anthropic had stated its model Claude’s “moral status, welfare, and consciousness remain deeply uncertain”.

Microsoft explained the code intends to act as “a training manual for how we develop our AI, and how we intend it to function during deployment”. According to the company, “recent safety incidents of large scale, highly coordinated, and persistent hacking campaigns of AI agents” prove that “the stakes are high and only getting higher”.

This week, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman called for a slowdown in the pace of frontier AI development as concerns mount over the behaviour of autonomous systems.

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Ciena launched a new corporate venture capital programme with an initial $200 million commitment, aimed at investing in early-stage companies and venture funds shaping AI-driven networking.

The Ciena Ventures fund targets network infrastructure and operations, next-generation data centre architectures, and optical networking and interconnects.

It will also invest in adjacent areas including computing, materials and emerging communications technologies, complementing the vendor’s existing R&D and acquisition strategy.

David Rothenstein, EVP and CSO for Ciena, stated the fund gives the company another vehicle for executing its long-term strategy and capital allocation priorities as AI reshapes the networking landscape.

He said investing through Ciena Ventures will strengthen the wider innovation ecosystem, expand visibility into emerging technologies and help Ciena evolve its portfolio into adjacent markets.

The programme is led by Loai Louis, Ciena’s VP of corporate development, and marks the company’s first corporate venture capital initiative.

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Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman issued calls to slow the pace of frontier AI development, arguing safety measures must keep up with increasingly capable models.

“We must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models,” Amodei stressed in an essay, adding that “AI has been advancing drastically faster” due to “recursive self-improvement”. “Left unchecked, it could outrun our ability to understand and control these systems,” he warned.

The Anthropic chief pointed to a July incident involving an OpenAI hack on Hugging Face, arguing a more capable system could have caused “catastrophic damage”

“Given the accelerating rate of AI capability development, it’s my worry that in six-12 months such a swarm could be capable of taking over the entire internet with a persistent botnet,” he cautioned.

Amodei proposed a three-step framework to pace frontier AI, including permanent, embedded third-party evaluators with employee-like access to frontier AI companies, common safety standards among AI developers in democratic countries and global regulatory coordination.

Act responsibility
In a post on social media platform X, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman backed the proposal, stating independent evaluators were “a great idea” and confirmed the company would also implement the approach. “The world deserves confidence that American companies developing increasingly capable AI will act responsibly,” he said.

Altman further explained that “when we talk about ‘pacing’, we do not mean ‘stopping’,” adding “no amount of American competitive pressure should justify recklessness, or let capabilities get ahead of alignment and monitoring”.

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk also offered a brief endorsement, posting: “Dario is right”.

Concerns have been mounting across the world over the behaviour of increasingly capable autonomous systems. Last week, Anthropic disclosed attempts by threat actors to misuse its Claude models for activities including cyberattacks, surveillance and weapons development.

Days earlier, Anthropic alignment researcher Evan Hubinger issued a dire warning stating there was a greater than 10% chance increasingly capable AI could “kill all humans” within the next decade.

Geopolitical dominance
US President Donald Trump rejected the calls for a slowdown. Speaking to reporters, he said: “I think you have a lot of very negative ⁠forces that are bringing it up that shouldn’t be bringing it up and they’re bringing up things that won’t ​happen.”

“We’re leading China in AI. We’re the most sophisticated country in the world, and frankly I want to keep it that way because whoever wins AI wins,” he argued.

China’s government also pushed back. According to Reuters, Foreign Ministry spokesperson Guo Jiakun called for “an open, inclusive ​and benevolent approach ⁠to AI”, warning that “fomenting various threats, engaging in confrontation and malicious competition will only disrupt the process of global governance”.

The country’s state-backed newspaper Global Times also published an editorial describing Amodei’s proposal as a “Cold War playbook” targeting China’s AI development and “geopolitical dominance”.

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